Kinopio Architecture and Costs

💐 Kinopio Roadmap

Kinopio Affiliate Program

Right-Side TOC Hover over the visual Table Of Contents for an easier and funner way to jump to your Boxes, Lists, and Line dividers.

Keep your focus on a set of cards and tasks by wrapping them in a box and clicking the box filter button to fade everything else out.

Improved the reliability of the New Feature Update check – to make sure you’re always using the latest version of Kinopio

quality of life

when you paint select items and then Copy or Move them to a new space, when you jump to that space from the notification button, those items will be selected so you can find them more easily

Before, when creating a new space you’d have to choose between creating a ‘normal’ space, or a ‘journal’ space. Now all spaces gain the flexibility to be more journal-like with date cards and the ability to append today’s date to the name.

If you have previously created journals, they’ve been added to a ‘Journals’ group, so you can still find and filter on them. More details:

Merging regular and journal spaces functionality

Spaces open faster, cards updates faster, over the last two quiet weeks almost everything got oiled and tuned.

Details in

IndexedDB for storing local data

Eiko Font

An elegant header font for the very finest of spaces

Just a nice little quality of life thing.

When shift-dragging an item to snap its position to a grid, handy guide lines are to shown to help maintain horizontal or vertical alignment across a long drag distance.

Fixed a bug preventing notifications (e.g. someone faved or added cards to your space) to be saved to the

server

Logged operations now show their special requestId that to make debugging

server

issues easier

Fixed an issue that could cause the

server

to crash under some conditions when an operation failed for whatever reason

Fixed a bug preventing splitting/merging cards

Performance up when typing in cards with [[tags]]. In my exaggerated test space, render blocking when typing in a card with a tag went down from 3s to 250ms

Fixed a issue with connection lines not having the correct paths (i.e. stray lines) because card dimensions weren’t properly being updated

Group spaces more reliably show up in your spaces list

Connection lines appear behind locked cards instead of in front

Widened the Explore section and added a tips button to help explain each section to new users

Items in checked boxes have to be completely contained in parent box to be faded out when the box is checked off [x]

When cards fail to create correctly on the

server

for any reason you’ll see an error notification

Spaces with >30 space links now load all links correctly

Improved Panning [New] Hold shift or right-click and drag to pan around. Now a lot faster and smoother.

quality of life

While holding space or right-click to pan, making quick movements and letting go will momentum scroll the page to make it easier to cover long-distances

before, to open card links, you had to click an → button or open the card first.

Improved Hiding Spaces marking spaces as hidden is now scoped to the user instead of the space itself. So if you’re in a group or a collaborator and you hide a space, that space will only be hidden to you (instead of hidden to everyone as before).

Your spaces list now loads faster and spaces in the list won’t jump around after loading. Besides addressing some long-standing bugs, a stable spacelist adds to the overall feeling of speed and solidness

The accuracy of space PDFs has been improved. Also, instead of having to wait in the app for the PDF to generate (which could take a minute~), you’ll now receive an email once it’s ready to download.

Improved PDF Export

(should I add this to the browser extension too?)

help docs

Minimap

Get a birds eye view perspective and jump around big spaces with the minimap by holding the space-key or the right-mouse-button. (You can also open a persistent minimap from the Sidebar)

Recent Spaces in Copy or Move

When moving or copying cards between spaces, you can quick-select your most recently visited spaces. Just a little quality of life update.

Minimap

People who start using groups, tend to really get into groups. So now you can add emojis, in addition to color, to more easily visually tell them apart.

The Minimap dialog was moved from the sidebar to the the footer, so that it’s easier to use in presentation mode

When opening card links, clicking search results, or jumping to boxes from the minimap, they’ll pulse so you can easily find them.

To easily find your templates and quickly edit them, filter your spaces list by Templates.

Make boxes stand out with a box background image to create a visual portal to another world, or a section, or a slide.

You can now drag boxes to bring them to the front of other boxes. Like cards, each box now has a z-index value.

by Lucas

Markdown Link Shortcut [New]

Card header fonts don't always load

Code block color issue

april-25-bug-fixes.txt

URL text on dark background

Spacing between cards, vote overlaps card

Saying Bye to Glitch

Lag when moving cards

Upload security fixes

More Efficient Images Uploaded card images and backgrounds are dynamically compressed to load much more quickly, and improve snappiness when scrolling – especially in mood-boards and personal photo album spaces.

Bad line drawing cache? with example

Missing letters bug

also improved the ui

"Delete all" button is not working

URL text on dark background

When zoomed out, lines crop strangely

Remove group, possible regression

Set New Card Color Per Space

Boxes Windows bug

Kinopio has been given a full under-the-hood rebuild. It’s the same race-car for the mind, now even faster. This release sets the technical foundation for the next 6+ years of Kinopio.

Recent Fixes

- improved design of copy/move selected items dialog
- re-introduced leave this space button for collabs , in UserDetails
- fix drawing undo/redo
- fix new cards added notification emails to collabs
- fixed space search '/' typing in card name 
- released a fix for non members being able to drag boxes in open or closed spaces
- copy and pasting images into an open card now work
- show card image immediately when copy/pasting image into space (just like drag and drop)

When your brain is in “Todo Mode” you can now open the Sidebar to see a simple list of all your [] checkbox boxes and cards. Helpful for getting things done after planning out a project, or for checking off groceries.

🌺 Today’s Fixes Working on updating all the articles on the Help site and re-checking all the workflows and pro-tips led me to these fixes so far:

- fixed drag and drop image on previous image card replaces previous image
- fixed ⌘/ctrl-click a box to select the cards inside it
- fixed sidebar inbox doesn't display cards if inbox is not already in cache
- fixed clicking sidebar inbox card correctly adds it to current space and removes from inbox

🌵 Recent fixes

- fixed /inbox route
- visible: connection type color swatch in 'use last type' button
- visible: multiple selected connections Type button swatches
- fixed remote space loading error, now correctly falls back to your last loaded space when an error occurs
- prevent app from only displaying an empty page when api is down
- simplify how scheduled tasks are run on api, potentially to prevent memory leaks
- improved sync reliability: if requests don't make it to the server, it'll try the same requests again on next refresh.

To make it a little easier to select the right h1/h2 fonts, a preview is displayed in the ‘Aa’ font picker.

Boxes can grow to envelop cards when you drag them over edges. Boxes snap together the same way. Handy for making your own grids, kanbans, and calendars.

increased max card tilt angle to 90deg and improved the tilt drag algo

🎑 Recent Updates and Fixes

- Fixed connections not being correctly created through the Connect button in multipleSelectedActions dialog
- Fixed bulk email sending, Weekly Review emails now send again every Sunday (unless you unsubscribed)
- Cards with images or video display transparent background color, even if you have a card color set, to look better with non-rectangular images/animated gifs
- The focusing animation on cards and boxes when you click a search result, minimap box, or follow a card link clears after the pulsing animation completes
- increased amount of padding you get when you expand boxes by dragging a card near the edge, to give a less claustrophobic feeling
- [server-side] added card.isTodo and box.isTodo attributes and GET routes, for devs to do quicker checkbox item lookups
- New line scrolling in a max height CardDetails textarea cursor position is now correct
- @zachahn improved URL handling for ?hidden=true, and also added unit testing to the app
- Fixed can't sign in to /add page in browser extension or incognito
- On /add page and sidebar→inbox, check that the user has an Inbox space and show an error if they don't

🐸 Recent Fixes

- Fixed Safari bug where closing ConnectionDetails would cause a scroll to the top of the page
- iOS share sheet now loads correctly
- When using the iOS share sheet or browser extensions to add URLs to the Inbox, the URL cards will now show url previews
- Cards added to the Inbox this way will be more cleanly separated
- Holding the space key while in Drawing mode now pans the page as expected
- Fixed a bug that prevented certain animated GIFs from loading
- Fixed Chrome bug where adding cards to the current space from Sidebar → Inbox would fail
- Fixed Chrome bug preventing multiple copy/paste operations
- If you have system scrollbars are set to always display, the CardDetails input only displays a scrollbar if there's scrollable content
- Fixed regression: when typing a card name, other cards directly below it shimmy downwards to avoid overlap
- @Lucas added unit tests to the server's authorization methods. This will be especially important later when adding the ability to collaborate with non-users
- Unused/partially typed tags in cards will be cleaned up when the card is closed so that you'll only see tags that you've actually used

Book Worm [New] A new Card Frame for reading enthusiasts, or wanna-be enthusiasts like me. Created by Dávid

https://yoursit.ee/xou

More Drawing Tools You can now draw with a thinner XS sized brush, and erase your whole drawing at once with the remove button

For sharing a presentation space with your audience, or when inviting someone IRL to collaborate

💁‍♀️ Fixes in the Latest Release:

- Stricter rules for Comment Only spaces, non-members cannot resize boxes, change fonts, or connect items that are created by other users
- Fix Font Preview (Aa) if card has [] or tags
- Fix Font Preview crashing when selecting items with different fonts
- Font Preview also includes selected card/box color
- Fixed a bug preventing adding multiple tags to a card through the Tag button
- Manually removing tags from the sidebar, now correctly deletes them from the server
- Fixed a bug where adding tags would change their color

Add lines from the toolbar (or with ‘L’) to mark pages, sections, slides, and other large or variable height areas that can be cumbersome to manage with boxes alone. Jump between lines, and make room in busy spaces with their ‘Select All Below’ button.

💐 [New] Under-the-hood Improvements:

- performance improvements to how spaces load, in some cases reducing space loading times by 50%
- collaboration stability and performance improvements, noticeable when real-time collaborators are paint selecting, moving their cursor, and updating items
- fixes for crashes and sync errors that could happen during collaboration
- drawing performance improvements, most noticeable in large spaces with drawings
- added a new 'debug grid' background
- dark mode fixes

Handy for chart axes among other things

Hold shift to draw straight lines

Due to popular demand, erasing over a drawing stroke now erases the whole stroke immediately. (Actually the whole drawing system was rewritten to improve reliability and performance.)

🚛 Recent Fixes

- Fixed an issue where cards with default backgroundColor wouldn't change color when theme changed
- Whether URL strings display on cards is now determined by attr card.isVisible, a simpler replacement for the old `isHidden=true` query string
- Improve error logging in production with sourcemaps
- Transparent colors in the ColorPicker now have a transparent-background pattern to make them easier to identify
- cards with space or other card URLs show '→' link buttons to make it easier to jump to the linked item

A quality of life update for the new year 🥂

Cards work best when they’re a single idea or thought – but if you’re editing long-form text, you can now drag the bottom-right to resize the card editing dialog. Double click the corner to reset the size.

🥂 Recent Small Fixes and Updates

- Card URL '→' button now consistently positioned next to connector button
- The card URL button is hidden when card is locked
- Card lock button is faded out to match connector opacity
- Pressing ESC while dragging near box edge cancels box snap
- Only space members can do right-click pings
- Lines are easier to identify in Minimap dialog

Resize Card Details

While holding the alt/option key, drag cards or boxes to duplicate them. Duplicating boxes will also dupe everything inside them.

If you type the markdown syntax for quotes inside a card: > Give a hoot, don't pollute It’ll be formatted as a quote. Easy peasy.

You can use the little download button to download an image, video, audio, or document file in a card.

Download Card File

Box Snapping v2 [New] Re-introducing the ability to drag a box near the outer edge of another box to snap them together. Handy for making grids and tables.

Added play/pause button to chill out distracting video (mp4) cards

Spent the last couple days improving the reliability and backups for your uploaded files, like images, videos, and mp3s. One of those “better to do before you actually ever need it” kind of things.

Added play/pause button to chill out distracting video (mp4) cards

The list of Sidebar → Todos now hides completed cards by default, and also shows a little progress remaining count

Navigate your space’s Table of Contents by jumping between lines, lists, and boxes sorted by Y position.

Have you ever felt the need for a handy place to work on some longer-form text associated with a space, or little private place draft a note before sharing it in a card? Sidebar → Note

Private Space Notes

Better unFurl previews for invite URLs

Added an input confirmation step when permanently deleting account for extra safety. Also refactored the design of the flow into it’s own dialog so that it works better on smaller screens.

Drag Lines Higher Up Horizontal line dividers can be positioned higher up for more flexibility. They’ll neatly shift themselves out of the way of the toolbar.

Sidebar → Links shows Outgoing Links

Line ‘Jump To’ Buttons

Name and color of connection lines can now be directly edited, just like cards (this replaces the previous system of connections belonging to shared connectionTypes).

Simplified Connection Names and Colors

If you’re a fan of kinopio and want to share it with your YouTube, TikTok, or IG audience you should join the friends of kinopio affiliate program. Your viewers get 10% off, and you get paid 20% commissions

Toggle on a little minimap to help explore spaces. It’s little, beautiful, and fast.

Persistent Minimap

Hold shift while dragging cards, boxes, or lists to line them up perfectly with nearby items.

📧 Bulletin № 38 – Busytown, was emailed out today and is now available on the blog

Shift-Drag to Snap Align

Drag duplicating cards includes their connections, boxes duplicate with everything inside, and lists and lines can be now be directly duplicated as well.

@user mentions in cards

Bring it all together by combining checkboxes, tags, @-user mentions, and due dates, to do full project management.

Type @ to add due dates to cards. Reminders will be sent on the day of.

Add Due Dates to Cards

Connector Preview Color

Edit Below Card Use this little toggle to shift the CardDetails editing area out of the way of the card so you can see what you’re typing on it.

Added scroll to drag and resize items. So when holding on to an item and scroll, the item will move with you. Same goes for when you’re resizing.

(Even if you’re a long-time user, you might find some of them handy, like the Calendar or Time Tracker.)

The Templates picker was rebuilt from the ground up with a bunch of all-new and more useful templates that use modern Kinopio features like Boxes, Lines, and Lists.

(You can still create lists w the toolbar or by paint select)

Even though it demos well, snapping cards together to create new lists will be removed. It had the unintended consequence of needing to be more careful when moving cards, and it got in the way of tight mood-boarding.

Vertically group and easily reorder cards by snapping them into lists.

This helps keep everyone aligned not only with “what we need to do”, but also with “why we’re doing this”, and other visual inspiration.

Lists allow you to add more organization and Kanban-style project management pipelines like Todo/Doing/Done, in the same space that you used to figure out the plan.

When you hover over an item’s connector, it’ll show you what color a new connection line dragged from it will be. Nothing too crazy, just a nice little detail.

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recent updates ⤵

2026

2025

Changelog

Eiko Font